Yehuda Halper – författare

Aryeh Motzkin was an extraordinary thinker and writer. Much of his work appeared in small academic journals despite the fact that it is often quite accessible, even to non-experts. This volume assembles his most important published papers along with several unpublished papers. They all have a single theme: the encounter between the Jewish tradition and philosophy as discovered by Plato and Aristotle. The book’s first group of essays deal with the way medieval Jewish thinkers understood the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. The second group deals with how these same medieval thinkers were themselves interpreted by modern thinkers, beginning with Spinoza. A recurring issue in all the essays is the difficulty inherent in any encounter between philosophia perennis and the changing history of Judaism.

The twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher Averroes sought to understand the divine in a way independent of religious theology, by turning to the philosophical works of Aristotle and, to a lesser extent, Plato. In doing so, he established standards of scientific inquiry into God that were and remain highly influential on Jewish and Christian thought. Averroes, however, does not provide much in the way of demonstrative knowledge of God, and most of his arguments remain dialectical, rhetorical, or political. This volume explores the various pathways towards attaining divine knowledge that we find in Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle’s De Anima, Metaphysics, and Nicomachean Ethics, and on Plato’s Republic, along with Averroes’ Epistle on Divine Knowledge, Decisive Treatise, and more.